One post a week

Sat, Apr 14, 2018

My name is Brendan Abolivier. I’m a young guy from Brest, France working as a junior system administrator at CozyCloud, a small French company working on an open personal cloud platform aiming at giving people ownership on their personal data back.

When I was at BreizhCamp, a 3-day long tech conference in the West of France that happened a couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk called “Teaching is learning: become a better dev by sharing your knowledge”. During this talk, the speaker, Céline Martinet Sanchez, spoke about her journey in software development and how she used knowledge that was shared by others and slowly became the one to share her own knowledge with random people on Internet forums. The full 28-min long talk is available right here.

In the “sharing” part of the talk, she described the different ways in which you can share knowledge with other people (forum posts, blog posts, talks, etc.), and remarked that we usually refrain from sharing such knowledge. We sometimes use excuses such as “I’m not good at explaining” or “I don’t have anything interesting to share with people”. She actually listed most of the excuses she used to either hear or say herself, and explained how most of them were just that, excuses with no real base. She explained that you won’t get better at explaining stuff by not doing anything about it, and that most of the time you actually have something interesting to share (you must have learned something at work this week, or while talking with friends or colleagues, that helped you in your projects), but you usually consider it as not interesting enough to share it with the rest of the world.

While listening to her speaking, I noticed that, most of the time, when I was considering going to a conference, I always had a small moment when I was undecided about how to attend (speaker? attendee? volunteer?), and always quickly rejected the speaker option because I thought I had nothing worth sharing. Same goes with writing blog posts. Most of the excuses she listed during her talk were excuses I heard coming from myself, and it made be think that maybe I devalue what I know too much, and maybe what I learn each day/week/month is worth sharing with the rest of the world. This thought became even more realistic as I got to speak with Céline Martinet Sanchez later that day, when she told me she was actually pushed by her colleagues towards doing a talk, went through this whole thought process and came up with an amazing talk that really stand out to me.

Realising all of this, I thought it would be a great exercise to finally make use of this blog I set up without a real goal a few months ago, and, each week, share something I learned at work or while working on personal projects, or just something I have in mind and want to share on this space. The posts can be tutorials, feedbacks, or even reflections on non-technical parts of stuff I work on. Some week there might even be nothing because I won’t write random stuff if I have nothing to talk (even though it’s very unlikely).

I hope you’ll hang here with me, and I’ll see you next week for the first post from this series!